If you have a land or cellular line that’s based in Park County, expect to soon pay an extra 25 cents a month to help fund the area’s 911 service.

Park County commissioners voted unanimously on Tuesday to raise the monthly 911 surcharge from 50 cents per phone line to 75 cents. The additional tax should start showing up on bills in about three months.

County officials said they needed to hike the fees in order to keep up with rising costs of the phone lines and equipment used for dispatching emergency services.

The current fees are only bringing in enough money to cover the annual maintenance of the 911 systems at the Cody Law Enforcement Center and the Powell Police Department, leaving little left over to replace equipment as it ages out.

“In five to seven years we’re not going to have enough to replace this system,” said County Chief Information Officer Mike Conners.

The county replaced the systems in Powell and Cody last year, so “we’re in good shape,” said Commission Chairman Jake Fulkerson. However, “now is the time to do this so we’re in good shape 10 years from now — or three years from now when all the technology changes,” Fulkerson said. “This is just an area we can’t mess with.”

By raising the fee to 75 cents, the county expects to collect an extra $85,000 per year, for a total of roughly $260,000.

All landlines in Park County will need to pay the new fee. Whether a cellular customer will be subject to the additional fee depends on where their service is based.

“People that come in here with out-of-area phones are typically paying their cellphone company back in New York, or wherever they’re from, and the money goes to [those places],” Conners said. “But by the same token, the reverse happens, too.”

Between people moving in with out-of-area cellular lines and moving out with Park County numbers, he said it tends to be about a wash in terms of the fees collected.

Prepaid cellphone users, meanwhile, pay a 1.5 percent tax instead of a monthly fee.

Commissioners didn’t have to hold a formal hearing before raising the 911 surcharge, but decided to do so to provide added transparency. The last time the county proposed raising the fee to 75 cents — all the way back in 2003 — a small but vocal crowd showed up to oppose the idea and it was shot down. This time, however, not a single member of the general public participated in the public hearing.

Park County is one of the last counties to raise its fee to the 75-cent maximum, with only two counties now remaining below that level, Conners said.

Staying at 50 cents for so long “just shows we’ve done a good job of managing our expenses for all this time,” Fulkerson said. He noted that some counties have been pushing the Wyoming Legislature to allow them to impose a surcharge of up to 95 cents per month.

Beyond providing funding for the equipment in Powell and Cody, the county also sends 10 percent of the collected funds to Yellowstone National Park, helping provide emergency dispatching services for the portion of the park that lies within Park County.